RECORDINGS IN REVIEW: THE NEW TRADITIONALISTS

1 6 9 R R E C O R D I N G S I N R E V I E W T I M O T H Y Y O U N G In what seems to be a rite of passage for many aging singers, once they have reached the venerable age of fifty, a standard career move is to explore the Great American Songbook. Viz.: Rod Stewart (five volumes and counting), Carly Simon, Natalie Cole, Annie Lennox, even Joni Mitchell. For some of these singers, the move is a slight shift to the center; for others, it seems like a 180-degree turn from their alternative and punk roots. The quality of the recordings is variable, to be polite, with some of the singers finding the heart of songs by Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and Porter. Most of these run-throughs, though, seem to be principally exercises in nostalgia – pleasant enough for a dinner party. This habit o≈cially became codified as an American Cultural Practice in 2015 when Bob Dylan released Shadows in the Night, which was followed in 2016 by Fallen Angels – a pair of albums of covers of songs made famous (for the most part) by Frank Sinatra. If you’ve been waiting all your life to hear the man who was arguably the greatest champion of American folk music sing ‘‘Some Enchanted Evening,’’ ‘‘Young at Heart,’’ and ‘‘Skylark,’’ your wish has been answered. Among the questions that this phenomenon brings up are: Are 1 7 0 Y O U N G Y we ready to agree that the Great American Songbook is the one truly unavoidable and indestructible music genre? Is it a type of music that is above rebellion? When the beatniks, the hippies, the punks, and the New Wavers age out of the radio-friendly zone, is it inevitable for them to admit the supremacy of the classic piano ballad? In most of these recordings, the settings and arrangements are pretty much standard. Nothing distinctly personal has been done to alter the songs from their expected, almost codified forms. Only rarely do we find a singer willing to bend tradition and experiment , such as Bryan Ferry, who has created a number of recordings over his long career that take classics and spin them in interesting ways. He even did the reverse trick in 2013 with The Jazz Age, which features his own songs and some made famous by Roxy Music performed as 1920s jazz instrumentals. This timeshifting and genre-mixing game has even become a bit of a brand for some musicians, with acts such as the Baseballs performing rockabilly versions of Top 40 songs and Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox taking current pop hits and recasting them as ragtime or 1960s soul (with fitting album titles: Historical Misappropriation , Selfies on Kodachrome, and so on). But as clever as these recordings can be, what is really needed is an e√ort to cut through the games, the homages, and the reverential approaches to find out where we stand with the Great American Songbook. It’s not that we need any convincing to have faith in this type of music; it has roots and long-reaching influence. But there is a di√erence between simple adoration for the greats and a devotion to the form. I advocate an academic approach to the question: Who is out there creating new knowledge? If there is one single source for talent that is carrying forward and expanding the Songbook, it is Linn Records in Glasgow, Scotland . This company may be best known to audiophiles as a maker of high performance stereo components, but over the past three decades it has established one of the strongest jazz/vocal labels in the world. The roots of the Linn story are entirely practical. In 1982, after a failed e√ort to find high quality vinyl records to test its turntables, the company decided to start pressing its own discs. The first in-house production was with a Scottish band called the Blue Nile. The group’s 1984 debut album, A Walk Across the R E C O R D I N G S I...